Reading Short Stories

"If a novel is a marriage, a short story is a love affair.”

Last year, I mentioned how I never used to read short stories. I didn’t find them satisfying…Just when I was adjusting the world of the story, it was over.

But in Japan, I slowly fell in love with shorter forms. From haiku to palm-of-the hand stories, I began to really embrace the constraints of shorter forms.

In art, constraints become aesthetic elements of craft to be appreciated. It is in some ways, these craft elements are can be more interesting than the story itself.

Traditional Japanese poetry, for example, must have a seasonal term. It can make use of evocative place names and tropes. Short stories have a pivot. This is different from conflict and resolution… oh, how different it can be! See my essay in the Millions: Culture Shock.

My favorite short story (novella?) of all time is Tanizaki’s Captain Shigemoto’s Mother. If you haven’t read it yet—please don’t miss it!

The other day a writing mentor recommended I check out Bryan Washington—wow!!! Heirlooms is my favorite story of his in the New Yorker—and I found out that it was actually an excerpt from his novel Memorial. Everything about his writing is fun—especially his time in Japan!!

Heirlooms in the New Yorker

He also writes about Japanese food: Omurice and

Here are some recent collections that floored have me:

Kirstin Valdez Quade’s Night at the Fiestas

Daniel Mason’s A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth: Stories

Karen Russell’s Orange World

Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are (Trans Polly Barton)

Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage

The Best Short Stories 2021: The O. Henry Prize Winners (The O. Henry Prize Collection)—class textbook.

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Editor / Introduction),++

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Writing class darling (a perfect frame story?): Weike Wang’s Omakase